This is a personal teaching, learning and research tool compiled by Maureen Flynn-Burhoe under the Creative Commons License 2.5 BY-NC-SA It was last revised 2012/12/16.

This is not based on original research but is a compilation of writings by others, some of which are summarized while others are cited verbatim. See paragraph endings for sources. The originality resides in the ordering of events in chronological order. Choice of events was based on actual writing and/or research relating directly to hermeneutics and on works cited by others that develop concepts related to hermeneutics. Unfortunately for the second group the original linkages have not always been clarified. Attempts have been made to clearly indicate sources but this is a work in process and multiple errors and omissions remain. There is a webliography/bibliography at the end of the post.

One of the sources for this timeline is a 2004 course outline by Professor James Tully. I no longer have the link for that course outline but Professor Tully also taught a course entitled “Hermeneutics of the Subject Seminar (2008): The Question of the Subject in the Later Foucault” a Reading Seminar in the Spring Term (2008) at the University of Victoria.

This is a selective timeline of publications and social events that had an impact on the development of hermeneutics as a methodology in the social sciences. It is not intended to be fully comprehensive and it only includes those events and publications by authors I would use in my own teaching, learning and research. I attempt to acknowledge differing sides of debates and viewpoints. I include authors whose ideas and arguments do not resonate with my own but who are included in debates related to hermeneutics in its many forms throughout history. Ultimately the legitimacy of truth claims is strengthened when teachers, learners and researchers use methodologies, axiological and theoretical frameworks that are reflexive and inclusive. In other words there is greater chance of objectivity when quantitive and qualitative, empirical, hermeneutics, critically interpretive and post-structural approaches are used concurrently. Ideally a critical reader would approach texts with a heightened awareness of embedded ideologies, using an interpretive approach in order to reveal the hidden assumptions. Ideally such a critical interpretive hermeneutics would clarify content and context. See also Dominick LaCapra’s (2000) History and Reading (p.52). Lecapra suggests six possible contexts for interpreting complex texts: the author’s intentions, his motivations, society, culture (elite) culture, corpus (of the author’s works), and structure (genre: novels, etc.).” LaCapra is professor of humanities at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Major debates: the use of Foucault by Rorty, Taylor and Hacking in Philosophy. “The rationale for the seminar is the following. Although Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is one of the three or four most original, influential and cited scholars in the humanities and social sciences today, his work is often poorly understood and caricatured by many of his critics and followers. This problem is unsurprising as his works are demanding and his subject matter, approach and objectives changed through the course of his career. The seminar aims to address this problem by a careful reading of his most important works. Moreover, his works and methods are now at the center of the major debates in the humanities and social sciences – for example, the Foucault-Habermas debate, Foucault and Enlightenment, the use of Foucault by Rorty, Taylor and Hacking in Philosophy, Foucault and critical legal studies, the Foucault and feminism debate, the techniques of internal colonization and the possibilities of resistance in Indigenous studies, the use of Foucault by Edward Said and others in post-colonial and subaltern studies, Foucault and post-modernism, Foucault and the ‘history of the present’, the Foucault-inspired Governmentality school of advanced liberal societies, globalization and imperialism, Foucault and ethics, Foucault on freedom and truth-telling (parrhesia), the relationship of Foucault to Nietzsche and Kant, to name a few. These debates are redefining the humanities and social sciences for the 21 st century. By approaching a select number of these current debates and corresponding case studies after reading the primary texts, we will be in a better position to understand what is at stake in these important debates and to learn from the criticisms and defenses of Foucault’s work what is valuable and what is worth going beyond. It is hoped that this will give us a better appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of his works and methods, and how they may be useful in our own work.” For more see James Tully (2004).

Selected timeline of events related to the concept of hermeneutics used by diverse disciplines

325 Council of Nicea in 325, held in this city in modern-day Turkey in which the newly converted Roman Emperor Constantine called bishops from around the world to debate the various schools of thought that had emerged within Christianity. Was Christ divine? Were the Scriptures infallible? From this watershed Council “the Vatican” or “the Roman Catholic church” established both these beliefs as part of the essential teachings. In pre-Nicene debates the Alexandrian theologian named Arius argued that Jesus had undoubtedly been a remarkable leader, but he was not God in flesh. Arius proved an expert logician and master of extracting biblical proof texts that seemingly illustrated differences between Jesus and God, such as John 14:28: “the Father is greater than I.” In essence, Arius argued that Jesus of Nazareth could not possibly share God the Father’s unique divinity. In The Da Vinci Code (2003), author Dan Brown apparently adopts Arius as his representative for all pre-Nicene Christianity. At the Council of Nicea “authorship was the most important consideration for those who worked to solidify the canon. Early church leaders considered letters and eyewitness accounts authoritative and binding only if they were written by an apostle or close disciple of an apostle. This way they could be assured of the documents’ reliability. As pastors and preachers, they also observed which books did in fact build up the church—a good sign, they felt, that such books were inspired Scripture. The results speak for themselves: the books of today’s Bible have allowed Christianity to spread, flourish, and endure worldwide.” “Before the church adopted comprehensive doctrinal creeds, early Christian leaders developed a set of instructional summaries of belief, termed the “Rule” or “Canon” of Faith, which affirmed this truth. To take one example, the canon of prominent second-century bishop Irenaeus took its cue from 1 Corinthians 8:6: “Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Summarized and cited from http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2003/nov7.html

397 Augustine discussed hermeneutics in Book Twelve of his Confessions. Saint Augustine investigated the mode of creation and the truth of Scripture. “Augustine explores the relation of the visible and formed matter of heaven and earth to the prior matrix from which it was formed. This leads to an intricate analysis of “unformed matter” and the primal “possibility” from which God created, itself created de nihilo. He finds a reference to this in the misconstrued Scriptural phrase “the heaven of heavens.” Realizing that his interpretation of Gen. 1:1, 2, is not self-evidently the only possibility, Augustine turns to an elaborate discussion of the multiplicity of perspectives in hermeneutics and, in the course of this, reviews the various possibilities of true interpretation of his Scripture text. He emphasizes the importance of tolerance where there are plural options, and confidence where basic Christian faith is concerned.” Saint Augustine was one of the famous early Latin Fathers of the Catholic Church. Another was St. Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate. Hermeneutics in the Western world, as a general science of text interpretation can be traced the Hellennic Alexandria, the early Church Fathers used a general science of interpretation or biblical hermeneutics using philological tools that were similar to those used by Hellenic scholars. In their interpretations of the Bible the early Church Fathers stressed allegorical readings, frequently at the expense of the texts’ literal meaning. Their interpretations found within the visible sign a hidden sense in deeper agreement with the interpreters’ preconceived theme. Scholars in other traditions approached scriptural texts with similar hermeneutics: the Vedas and the Qu’ran and other sacred writings. Prefiguration and allegory seem typical strategies for reconciling texts whose surface banality was seen as beneath the dignity of an enlightened or moral world view. The Church Fathers or Fathers of the Church are the early and influential theologians and writers in the Christian Church, particularly those of the first five centuries of Christian history. The term means specifically writers and teachers of the Church, not saints in general; usually it is not meant to include the New Testament authors, but some of their texts were considered to enter the biblical canon. From wikipedia.

400 The fifth century is traditionally seen as the pivotal era for the “fall” of the western Roman Empire. Wood rejects a positivist chronological narrative of fifth-century history since early historians (Salvian, Avitus) only literary constructs not reflections of reality. Wood suggests that historians examine the shifting perceptions of identity experienced by 5th century historians (Salvian, Avitus). The standpoint or point of view of fifth-century authors is more revealing than their actual representation of reality who saw changing concept of cultural identity affected their ideas on continuity or calamity. (See Wood, Ian. “Fifth-century Gaul: a crisis of identity?”). Sidonius Apollinaris (430-) a member of a powerful Gallo-Roman Catholic aristocratic family became bishop of the Holy Roman Empire. Sidonius Apollinaris was a man of letters, politician, and churchman whose published letters reveal how he came to terms with the “fall” of the Roman Empire. His writing spans the period before and after the Visigoths rejected the authority of the Holy Roman Empire. Sidonius Apollinaris described how his own cultural, political and social identity changed with the shift in power and allegiances. See Goldberg. The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three “ages”: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. The Middle Ages of Western Europe are commonly dated from the end of the Western Roman Empire (5th century) until the rise of national monarchies, the start of European overseas exploration, the humanist revival, and the Protestant Reformation starting in 1517. These various changes all mark the beginning of the Early Modern period that preceded the Industrial Revolution. The corresponding adjective medieval, from the Latin medium ævum, is a common source of spelling confusion. It is most commonly spelled today medieval in both American English and British English. Less commonly it may appear as mediaeval in British English, a legacy of the Latin spelling, which uses the Latin letter æ (mediæval), rarely seen except to emphasise its Latin origins or as an antiquated spelling in older works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics#Etymology,

406-18 Tens of thousands Arian Christian Germans immigrated to Gaul between 406 and 418. The Gallo-Roman Catholics were ruptured from their western imperial authority in northern Italy. This rise of Arianism threatened the Western Roman Empire transforming Western civilization. For over a century orthodox Catholics and Arian Christians (the latter of whom denied the divinity of Christ) that had divided the Roman Empire. Historians debate the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. Were the explanations for the decline and decay moral and cultural as Gibbons argued or were they economic and social as Rostovtzeff argued. More recently historians argue that the events of Late Antiquity should not be represented as decline and decay but continuity, transformation, and achievement (Jones 1964; Brown 1971). Sidonius Apollinaris (430-) a member of a powerful Gallo-Roman Catholic aristocratic family became bishop of the Holy Roman Empire. Sidonius Apollinaris was a man of letters, politician, and churchman whose published letters reveal how he came to terms with the “fall” of the Roman Empire. His writing spans the period before and after the Visigoths rejected the authority of the Holy Roman Empire. Sidonius Apollinaris described how his own cultural, political and social identity changed with the shift in power and allegiances. See Goldberg. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH37/Goldberg.html

443 Hermias was one of the early Fathers of the Christian church called the Apologetic Fathers who tried to justify and defend the Christian doctrine against attacks from within the Hellenistic world through Christian contact with Greek Philosophy and Literature. Important Fathers of this era are St. Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, Hermias and Tertullian. Fathers prior to Nicene Christianity are collected in Ante-Nicene Fathers, those after are in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. (See wikipedia.org). Hermias was born into a family of Christians who experienced persecution. He early education was grounded in both Christianity and Greek studies. Hermias settled in Constantinople c. 400 where he began writing a history of the Church. He dedicated his history to Constantine (323-37) and eight of Constantine’s successors. There is some debate as to the relation between Socrates and Hermias who were contemporaries and whose work covered similar themes. Socrates work predates that of Hermias and Hermias’ work suffers from a comparison with the great Greek philosopher. It is acknowledged that Hermias used the work of Socrates as a guide, ordering his themes based on those of Socrates, referring to Socrates as a secondary source and in some cases being entirely dependent on Socrates for example in regard to the Novatians. Hermias wrote his history of the Christianity c. 443. Hermias’ history is filled with a “profound conviction of the Providential purpose of Christianity, and of its mission, under Divine guidance, for the regulation of the affairs of mankind. In doctrinal matters he aimed constantly at being in thorough accord with the Catholic party, and was a consistent opponent of heresy in all its forms.” Hermias “maintained a constant attitude of hostility to Arianism, Gnosticism, Montanism, Apollinarianism, etc., but acknowledged and admired the eloquence and impressive discourse of the leaders of these movements. Hermias recorded the early missionary activity of the Christians particularly the introduction of Christianity among the Armenians, the Saracens, the Goths, and other peoples. The history is especially rich in information regarding the rise and spread of monasticism. (See Healey). http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14165c.htm

476a Fall of the Western Roman Empire

476b Sidonius Apollinaris (430-) a member of a powerful Gallo-Roman Catholic aristocratic family became a bishop of the Holy Roman Empire. When tens of thousands of German Arians arrived in Gaul, Gallo-Roman Catholics were ready to accept the barbarian German Arians despite the Arian Visigoth’s denial of the divinity of Christ. Even Saint Augustine, the early Roman Father of the Catholic Church praised German Arians for their piety. Sidonius and his circle’s maintained friendly relations with the powerful and numerous Goths inspite of the the Nicene decree (380) imposing a strict adherence to the Nicene formulation of the Catholic faith which includes belief in the divinity of Christ on the Holy Roman Empire. Sidonius Apollinaris was a man of letters, politician, and churchman whose published letters reveal how he came to terms with the “fall” of the Roman Empire. His writing spans the period before and after the Visigoths rejected the authority of the Holy Roman Empire. Sidonius Apollinaris described how his own cultural, political and social identity changed with the shift in power and allegiances as a Gallo-Roman. By 476 a German general had recently deposed the last western emperor and the Gothic court became dominus of a “conquered world.” All of Gaul was subjected to the treaty-breaking race of the Goths. Gallo-Roman generals and scholars could no longer travel freely, and road blocks often harassed letter carriers. Gaul was overrun by Euric’s forces by 476, Sidonius portrayed Euric’s conquests as an Arian holy war against Christian orthodoxy using these words, “So repugnant is the mention of the word ‘catholic’ to his mouth and his heart that one doubts whether he is more the ruler of his nation or of his sect (secta). He imagines that the success of his dealings and plans comes from the legitimacy of his religion, whereas it would be truer to say that he achieves it by earthly good fortune.” From that time onward Sidonius Apollinaris consciously redefined his Gallo-Roman identify associating himself with orthodox Christianity, the Gallic Church, and the rejection of the Arianism of the Goths. See Goldberg.

700 In the Roman Catholic Church, St. John of Damascus, who lived in the 8th century, is generally considered to be the last of the early Church Fathers and at the same time the first seed of the next period of church writers, scholasticism which is the next stage of the evolution of hermeneutics in the Western world, as a general science of text interpretation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Fathers

1440 From wikipedia: The discipline of hermeneutics emerged with the new humanist education of the 15th century as a historical and critical methodology for analyzing texts. Alvesson and Sköldberg (2000) trace hermeneutics as exegesis to the Protestant analysis of the Bible and the humanist study of the ancient classics during the Renaissance. In a triumph of early modern hermeneutics, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla proved in 1440 that the “Donation of Constantine” was a forgery, through intrinsic evidence of the text itself. Thus hermeneutics expanded from its medieval role explaining the correct analysis of the Bible. In the 19th century Wilhelm Dilthey’s more historically conscious methodological hermeneutics sought to produce systematic and scientific interpretations by situating any text within the context of its production. Since Dilthey, the discipline of hermeneutics has detached itself from this central task and broadened its spectrum to all texts, including multimedia and to understanding the bases of meaning. In the 20th century, Martin Heidegger’s philosophical hermeneutics shifted the focus from interpretation to existential understanding, which was treated more as a direct, non-mediated, thus in a sense more authentic way of being in the world than simply as a way of knowing. Advocates of this approach claim that such texts, and the people who produce them, cannot be studied using the same scientific methods as the natural sciences, thus use arguments similar to that of the antipositivism. Moreover, they claim that such texts are conventionalized expressions of the experience of the author; thus, the interpretation of such texts will reveal something about the social context in which they were formed, but, more significantly, provide the reader with a means to share the experiences of the author. Among the key thinkers of this approach are Wilhelm Dilthey, a historian and philosopher; the sociologist Max Weber; the philosopher Martin Heidegger; and the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Jürgen Habermas attacked the principles of hermeneutics as conservative and advocated critical theory as an alternative, although in contemporary usage one could reasonably call hermeneutics an aspect of critical theory. Paul Ricoeur has attempted to reconcile and synthesize these two opposing traditions, although his own work is not hermeneutics in the Gadamerian sense at all. Rather surprisingly (given its origins) hermeneutics has also become influential on some thinkers in the artificial intelligence tradition who see cognitivist or information processing views of human understanding as being inadequate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics#Etymology Medieval interpretations of text incorporated exegesis in a fourfold mode that emphasized the distinction between the letter and the spirit of the text. This handy scheme of various ways of interpreting the text was handed down from Patristic programs of Late Antiquity. The literal sense (sensus historicus) of Scripture denotes what the text states or reports directly. The allegorical sense (sensus allegoricus) explains the text with regard to the doctrinal content of church dogma, as a manifestation in which each literal element has a symbolic meaning. The moral application of the text to the individual reader or hearer is the third sense, the sensus tropologicus or sensus moralis, while a fourth level of meaning, the sensus anagogicus draws out of the text the implicit allusions it contains concerning metaphysical and eschatological secret understanding, or gnosis. “The hermeneutical terminology used here is in part arbitrary. For almost all three interpretations which go beyond the literal explanations are in a general sense “allegorical.” The practical application of these three aspects of spiritual interpretation varied considerably. Most of the time, the fourfold sense of the Scriptures was used only partially, dependent upon the content of the text and the idea of the exegete. We can easily notice that the basic structure is in fact a twofold sense of the Scriptures, that is, the distinction between the sensus literalis and the sensus spiritualis or mysticus, and that the number four was derived from a restrictive systematization of the numerous possibilities which existed for the sensus spiritualis into three interpretive dimensions.” (Ebeling) The customary medieval exegetical technique divided the text in glossa (“glosses” or annotations) written between the lines and at the side of the text which was left with wide margins for this very purpose. The text was further divided into “scholia” which are long, exegetical passages, often on a separate page. This fourfold categorization is also found in Rabbinical thought. It remains to be seen if this rabbinical conception predates the Christian one. The fourfold categorizations are, in Hebrew; Peshat (simple interpretation), Remez (allusion), Derash (interpretive), and Sod (secret / mystical). More information can be found at Torah Study.,

1508 Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael) completed his enormous fresco The School of Athens in the Vatican’s Stanza della Segnatura.Fresco in Rome. Aristotle is depicted as strolling with Plato (427-347 BC) both rapt in dialogue. They are situated at the vanishing point of the one-point perspective used to create an illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. If the perspectival grid were visible it would reveal all lines converging at a point between these two central figures of the classical philosophical tradition of Greek antiquity. Raphael depicts both philosophers as firmly situated in divergent standpoint perspectives. These debates would span continents and centuries. Plato points upwards in reference to his belief in ideal forms or idealism. Aristotle points downward reflecting his stance that all knowledge is empirical, based in observation of natural phenomena (Kissick 1993:188). Medieval scholars rejected mysticism and abstract speculation and therefore adopted an empirical approach to knowledge. It was during the Italian Renaissance that Platonic idealism and Aristotle’s empiricism converged and Platonic philosophy enjoyed renewed popularity. Aristotle’s lyceum established under the patronage of his most powerful student, Alexander the Great, was a peripatetic or “walking”school. Students and teachers strolled together teaching and learning through conversations and dialogues. This is in sharp contrast to the rostrum pedagogy to which Bourdieu refers (1994:11). The immobile, rigid white-haired professor maintains a psychological, physical, intellectual, social and political distance between himself and his students in a stance that is likened to Plotinus’s dieu absconditus.

1517a Edit Hermeneutics in the Middle Ages witnessed the proliferation of non-literal interpretations of the Bible. Christian commentators could read Old Testament narratives simultaneously as prefigurations of analogous New Testament episodes, as symbolic lessons about Church institutions and current teachings, and as personally applicable allegories of the Spirit. In each case, the meaning of the signs was constrained by imputing a particular intention to the Bible, such as teaching morality, but these interpretive bases were posited by the religious tradition rather than suggested by a preliminary reading of the text. Thus, when Martin Luther and other 16th century reformers argued that Christians could interpret Scripture for themselves, the Catholic Church responded that the authority of tradition was necessary. Martin Luther was professor, preacher and confessor at the Castle Church, a foundation of Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony. This church was named “All Saints” because it was the repository of his collection of holy relics. This parish served both the Augustinian monastery and the university. As a priest concerned about the spiritual welfare of his parishioners, Luther rejected the traffic in indulgences where Catholics could purchase pardon for their sins with the proceeds going to the renovations of Saint Peter’s cathedral in Rome. Luther saw this sale of indulgences as an abuse that could mislead people into relying simply on the indulgences themselves to the neglect of the confession, true repentance, and satisfactions. Luther preached three sermons against indulgences in 1516 and 1517. On October 31, 1517, according to traditional accounts, Luther’s 95 Theses were nailed to the door of the Castle Church as an open invitation to debate them[6]. The Theses condemned greed and worldliness in the Church as an abuse and asked for a theological disputation on what indulgences could grant. Luther did not challenge the authority of the pope to grant indulgences in these theses. The 95 Theses were quickly translated into German, widely copied and printed. Within two weeks they had spread throughout Germany, and within two months throughout Europe. This was one of the first events in history that was profoundly affected by the printing press, which made the distribution of documents easier and more widespread. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther.

1517b Martin Luther protested against the Catholic Church which heralded the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, a sixteenth-century religious movement. He objected to the catholic doctrine of the Transubstantiation or the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ transformed from bread to the Sacred Host in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. See Rob Shields (2003:5) for a discussion of the historical impact of the Reformation on concepts of the Virtual and the Real.

1521 The 1521 edict forbade Lutheran teachings within the Holy Roman Empire. The 1526 session of the Diet had agreed to toleration of Lutheran teachings (on the basis of Cuius regio, eius religio) until a General Council could be held to settle the question, but by 1529, the Catholic forces felt they had gathered enough power to end the toleration without waiting for a Council. In a broader sense of the word, Protestant began to be used as the collective name for a sudden movement of separation from the Roman Catholic Church, the beginning of which is ordinarily connected with the public disputes raised by Martin Luther. Later, John Calvin, French theologian among the Swiss; Zwinglian, and Reformed churches figured prominently in a movement that embraced a wider, more international diversity of churches. A third major branch of the Reformation, which encountered conflict with the Catholics, as well as with the Lutherans and the Reformed, is sometimes called the Radical Reformation. Some Western, non-Catholic, groups are labeled as Protestant (such as the Religious Society of Friends, for example), even if the sect acknowledges no historical connection to Luther, Calvin or the Roman Catholic Church. In German-speaking and Scandinavian lands, the word “Protestant” still refers to Lutheran churches in contrast to Reformed churches, while the common designation for all churches originating from the Reformation is “Evangelical”. As an intellectual movement, Protestantism grew out of the Renaissance and universities, attracting some learned intellectuals, as well as politicians, professionals, and skilled tradesmen and artisans. The new technology of the printing press allowed Protestant ideas to spread rapidly, as well as aiding in the dissemination of translations of the Bible in native tongues. Nascent Protestant social ideals of liberty of conscience, and individual freedom, were formed through continuous confrontation with the authority of the Bishop of Rome, and the hierarchy of the Catholic priesthood. The Protestant movement away from the constraints of tradition, toward greater emphasis on individual conscience, anticipated later developments of democratization, and the so-called “Enlightenment” of later centuries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant

1543 François Rabelais, (1494-v.1553), bridged both periods, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He loved the humour of the Middle ages but was a Renaissance man, a wise humanist, a doctor who was knowledgeable in Greek science and he encouraged a return to nature. He was an Evangelist who believed that humanism should purify the Catholic religion. He opposed the papal materialistic ambitions. He called for a return to the study of the original sacred Christian writings in order to arrive at a better interpretation. http://classes.bnf.fr/dossitsm/b-rabela.htm

1555 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was accused of heresy in Oxford against the Catholic Church since Cranmer rejected Transubstantiation or the belief in the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist and wine. Cranmer favoured the position that Christ was virtually or symbolically present in the Eucharist. Cranmer’s attempt to balance Lutheran teachings with those of Catholicism marked the beginnings of the Anglican tradition. This is based on Rob Shields (2003:5-6) discussion of the impact of the Reformation on concepts of the ‘virtual’.

1650 The term ‘hermeneutics’ which means translate, interpret, make intelligible (Mautner 1997: 248) can be traced to Dannhauer in c. 1650 who classified texts in three categories: sacred, legal and literary. From a theological perspective the goal was to provide a correct interpretation, from the legal perspective, an authoritative statement.

1662 Blaise Pascal (1623-62) argued brilliantly regarding the existence of God. Human rational minds are insufficient to grasp the reality of an all powerful, unknowable God. Yet humans seek a meaning for their lives by choosing whether or not to believe in the existence of a Primal Cause, a divine Plan by a divine Creator, the Author of the Divine Word. Pascal argued that if God that it the more reasoned approach with the least harm is to choose to believe in God and to live a life as if He existed following the divinely ordained Plan. If one chooses to not believe then there is a risk of an eternity of regret. By choosing to live one’s life as if God existed one may come to belief by slowly changing the habits of one’s everyday life. Pascal, a French mathematician, physicist, religious thinker and philosopher wrote in a classical style that was admired even by his detractors such as the free-thinking Voltaire and the arch-orthodox Boussuet for its lucidity and precision. See Mautner 1997:412.,

1689 Locke enunciated the freedom to choose one’s belief system, “No one by nature is bound unto any particular church or sect, but everyone joins himself voluntarily to that society in which he believes he has found that profession and worship which is truly acceptable to God. The hope of salvation, as it was the only cause of his entrance into that, so it can be the only reason to stay there.A church, then, is a society of members voluntarily united to that end (Locke 1689).”

1700s-1800s. British empiricists and German logicians argued that laws of logic were generalized accounts of patterns of human thought and reasoning. E. Husserl (1900), G. Frege (1894) argued that logic is not subjective but objective matter of relations among propositions, predicate and terms.

1725 However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State.Voltaire was exiled to England where he was attracted to the philosophy of John Locke and ideas of Sir Isaac Newton. He studied England’s constitutional monarchy, its religious tolerance, its philosophical rationalism and most importantly the natural sciences. Voltaire also greatly admired English religious tolerance and freedom of speech, and saw these as necessary prerequisites for social and political progress. He saw England as a useful model for what he considered to be a backward France, but nevertheless he was quoted as saying “It is to Scotland that we look for our civilisation.” John Locke has often been classified, along with David Hume and George Berkeley, as a British Empiricist. John Locke studied medicine extensively during his time at Oxford in th 1660s, working with such noted virtuosi as Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, Robert Hooke and Richard Lower. In 1666, he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury who became his patron. David Hume (1711-76) (N.B. The birth date is May 7 by the Gregorian reckoning of his time; this date being used by the International Humanist and Ethical Union when celebrating his birthday) was a Scottish philosopher and historian. Along with Adam Smith and Thomas Reid among others, Hume was also one of the most important figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. Many regard Hume as the third and most radical of the so-called British Empiricists, after the English John Locke and the Anglo-Irish George Berkeley. Hume was heavily influenced by these other two Empiricists, along with various Francophone writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, and Joseph Butler. The rationalist Enlightenment and movement toward a more objective historical perspective led hermeneutics, especially Protestant exegesis, to view Scriptural texts as secular Classical texts were viewed. Scripture thus was interpreted as responses to historical or social forces, so that apparent contradictions and difficult passages in the New Testament, for example, might be clarified by comparing their possible meanings with contemporaneous Christian practices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics#Etymology

1739-62 David Hume (1711-76) was a Scottish philosopher and historian. Along with Adam Smith and Thomas Reid among others, Hume was also one of the most important figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. Voltaire was quoted as saying “It is to Scotland that we look for our civilization.” Many regard Hume as the third and most radical of the so-called British Empiricists, after the English John Locke and the Anglo-Irish George Berkeley. Hume was heavily influenced by these other two Empiricists, along with various Francophone writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, and Joseph Butler. The rationalist Enlightenment and movement toward a more objective historical perspective led hermeneutics, especially Protestant exegesis, to view Scriptural texts as secular Classical texts were viewed. Scripture thus was interpreted as responses to historical or social forces, so that apparent contradictions and difficult passages in the New Testament, for example, might be clarified by comparing their possible meanings with contemporaneous Christian practices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics#Etymology

1744-5 Edit: Upon “graduation he traveled to Holland, Germany and England. Because the English authorities believed that plague had broken in Sweden, his ship was obliged to wait offshore for six weeks. Swedenborg went ashore anyway, was caught and very nearly hanged. He lived in England from 1710 to 1713, and formed a lasting love for its culture. In 1716 King Charles XII of Sweden named him special assessor to the Royal College of Mines. He worked on several scientific fields from mathematics and physics to geology, and attempted twice to marry without success. Swedenborg’s career also included extended service in the upper house of the Swedish national legislature. In 1716-1718 he edited the scientific magazine Daedalus Hyperboreus, which published texts in Swedish. Most of his books Swedenborg published in Latin. OPERA PHILOSOPHICA ET MINERALIA (1734) was about metals, in REGNUM ANIMALE (1744-45) Swedenborg examined the mysteries of soul, DE CULTU ET AMORE DEI (1745, Worship and the Love of God) dealt with the birth of the world, and ARCANA CAELESTIA (1749-1756) was a commentary on Genesis (Morrell 2000).” http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/sweden.htm

1755 On November 1 Lisbon, Portugal was hit by a devastating earthquake. The Roman Catholic Church claimed this was evidence of divine justice punishing the wicked inhabitants of the city. Enlightenment scholars like Voltaire rejected the claim of divine intervention arguing that the pious city would have been spared on a Sunday morning by a just deity, not destroyed.

1770-1849 “As demonstrated in Symbol and Myth, David Pierre Giottin Humbert de Superville’s (1770-1849) pioneering semiotics represented a systematic attempt to arrive at the unconditional. Like many of the artist-theorists of his generation, he desired to image the unimageable, whether located in the distant past or in the intangible present. To that end, he developed a universal hermeneutics of root lines, colors, and vectors. This scheme still remains fundamental to any understanding of the visionary and geometric strain of Romantic abstraction and of fin-de-siècle Symbolism. Humbert’s system was also in advance of the general theory of semiotics devised in the mid-nineteenth century by Charles Saunders Peirce. It further adumbrated early twentieth-century emblematic totemism, developed by Emile Durkheim. [and] anticipated the French Structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s method of abstracting from individuals. Not unlike Coleridge or Blake, Humbert heroically, and in face of a rampant British associationism, attempted to expose the enduring elements of cultural and social life.” From a 1979 review by Barbara Maria Stafford.

1778 Jean-Antoine Houdon carved a series of busts of Voltaire including one which is now at the National Gallery of Canada entitled simply, “Head of Voltaire.” Voltaire was one of the most prominent Enlightenment philosophers known as a free thinker who opposed the ideas of Christian philosophers and deist such as Pascal. Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State.Voltaire was exiled to England where he was attracted to the philosophy of John Locke and ideas of Sir Isaac Newton. He studied England’s constitutional monarchy, its religious tolerance, its philosophical rationalism and most importantly the natural sciences. Voltaire also greatly admired English religious tolerance and freedom of speech, and saw these as necessary prerequisites for social and political progress. He saw England as a useful model for what he considered to be a backward France.,

1787 The Fall of the Roman Empire Revisited: Sidonius Apollinaris and His Crisis of Identity By Eric J. Goldberg: Scholars of Late Antiquity (the period roughly from A.D. 300-600) have long labored under the shadow of two monumental works: Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1787) and M. I. Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926). Though Gibbon, an intellectual of the Enlightenment, and Rostovtzeff, a Russian Marxist, approached their topic from very different viewpoints, they both agreed that the “transformation” of Western civilization from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages was a story of decline and decay. While Gibbon favored a moral and cultural explanation, Rostovtzeff not surprisingly emphasized economic and social factors. The last generation of scholars, however, has begun to revise this earlier scholarship. With the publication of A. H. M. Jones’s The Later Roman Empire, 284-602. A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (1964) and Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971), historians of Late Antiquity began to argue for continuity, transformation, and achievement where Gibbon and Rostovtzeff found only decline and decay. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH37/Goldberg.html

1797 “Wackenroder’s (1797) argument concerning the relativity of artistic competence seems to depend upon the principle of historicism which had been introduced into the philosophy of history by Johann Gottfried von Herder a few years earlier.(7) Herder had argued that there could be no objectivity in the writing of history because the historian was himself part of the historical process. In this view, there are no transhistorical absolutes, for all judgments are contingent upon the time and place in which they are produced. Wackenroder’s artistic relativism, his capacity to claim that Durer was the equal of Raphael, finds its basis in Herder’s emphasis on the singularity of the historical moment. For Wackenroder, the unique quality of a historical period, that which makes it unlike anything that preceded or followed it, can be put in the service of a national cause. The nationalism of the late eighteenth century, a moment when Germany sought to free itself from the political and cultural domination of France, found in history a means by which its case might be articulated and advanced (Moxey 1995).”

1800 By c. 1800 Schleiermacher introduced ‘universal hermeneutics in which even the spoken word became a text to be interpreted. He also argued that interpretation required a holistic approach which incorporated imaginative reconstruction of the way the text was produced, as well as the linguistic and historical context. Form c. 1800 all texts were eligible for interpretation. In the 18th century literary criticism in which hermeneutic devices unraveled hidden meanings, analysis was based on linguistic and historical contexts. See Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Kant developed aspects of hermeneutics by analyzing the role of intuition in distinguishing between the ‘moral’ (liberal arts and social sciences) and ‘natural’ (natural sciences) (See Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000). See also Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

1800s-a”It was in the Germanies, rather than in England or France, where the great movement of reform and rejuvenation of the university, both as a teaching and a research structure, was taking place during the nineteenth century. As the German historical school developed the criteria of objectivity and critical use of archival documents into a “science of history”, Geschichtswissenschaft, the universality of Ranke’s vision grounded in the timeless “‘holy hieroglyphe’–God with his plan and his will” (Breisach 1983: 233), balanced the picture of uniqueness and ceaseless change historians painted. However, with the rise of the Prussian state and its expansionist agenda, idealism gave way to the construction of a Volksgeist as a foundation for an inclusive German nationalism underwriting unification. The decline of the transcendent element left historicism, as science, open to positivist challenge and charges of relativism. In the first instance, it could preserve its objectivity only at the loss of its ethical orientation; in the second, it would cease to qualify as a producer of systematic knowledge. Consequently, in an especially sustained way in Germany, but not only in Germany, efforts were made to rethink theory and method in social research (Lee 1996).”

1800s German historians Ranke and Droysen extended the concept of hermeneutics from interpretations of Biblical passages and Greek and Roman classics to the spoken word (schleirmacker) and to historical acts in general. (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000:54).

1800s-b “The primacy of the natural sciences based on the Cartesian/ Newtonian model was well established by the beginning of the nineteenth century and the intellectual hierarchy sealed with John Stuart Mill’s arguments for the application of the principles of the “exact sciences” to “the backward state of the moral sciences” and Auguste Comte’s move to establish positivism as the methodological ground of historical and social inquiry” (Lee 1996).

1816a Hoffman wrote Der Sandmann which has been a source of archetypes for countless other artists and thinkers. Cagliostro, (1743-1795) was the last alchemist in the Age of Reason Hoffman’s Der Sandmann (1816). Balzac’s character Count Lanty in his novel Sarrassine (1830) was inspired by Count Cagliostro (1743-1795). Schreber, Daniel Paul. 1903. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Freud (1911) developed his theories of paranoia based on Schreber’s memoirs. Lacan revised Freud’s theory of paranoia by revisiting Schreber’s Memoirs. Freud (1919) developed his theory of the uncanny by referring to Hoffmann’s (1816) Der Sandmann. Stan Douglas referred to Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann and Schreber making links to Freudian concept of the uncanny, repressed memories and slippage of identity. Gabriel (2004) referred to Freud’s literary model of the uncanny based on Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann in her analysis of the Reitz (1984). The film Heimat developed concepts of unheimlich, remembering and forgetting. Kristeva developed her concepts of horror and the unnameable.

1816b In 1816 Hegel (and Compte) depicted the accomplishments of the human mind — with its ultimate in the intellectual — as the pivotal force behind historical epochs. The state of Prussia in 1816 was the state of intelligentsia. Hegel proclaimed the end of history. The ideals of liberty and equality were to be imminently universalized. It was a victory of western ideals of freedom and equality embodied in a liberal democratic state (Brym 2001).

1818 Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in which she presented Frankenstein’s complex spiritual malaise or spiritual oppression of both the over-ambitious Victor Frankenstein, who strives for godlike power, and of his self-denigrating creature, whose sense of monstrous difference prevents him from finding his place in the world. Shelley’s novel influenced both Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, whose theories enact contemporary versions of the spiritual responses of Victor and his creature. See Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis’s article (1999) “Spiritual Oppression in Frankenstein” in which she analyzed how Derrida, Kristeva and Shelley cast a fresh light on the new emphasis on the feminine and maternal qualities. Perrakis linked this to the 19th writings of Baha’u’llah who introduced a renewal of religion in the 1860s with these principals. She also equated the oppression experienced by Frankenstein is like that of a soul seeking God but does not know where to look.

1830 Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) published Sarrassine the story loosely based on the 18th century French sculptor Sarrasine. In the novel a young French sculptor Earnest-Jean Sarrassine, who had studied with the Jesuits from an early age went to Rome and fell passionately in love with Zambinella Jomelli a castrati opera singer who was under the patronage of the powerful Cardinal Cicognara. Sarrassine believed Zambinella was the most exquisite, perfect woman. When he learns he was the object of a deceitful joke he attempted to destroy the sculpture he had made of Zambinella but he was killed by the Cardinal’s men before he succeeded. Sarrassine declared, “A woman’s place was to me a place of refuge, a fatherland […] I shall never cease to think of that imaginary woman when I see a real woman (p.90).” Cardinal Cicognara had Sarrassine’s statue reproduced in marble. The Lanty family found it in the Albany museum and asked Vien to copy it. “The portrait which showed you Zaminella at twenty, a moment after you had seen him as a centenarian, afterward figured in Girodet’s Endymion; you yourself recognised the type in Adonis.” Zambinella must have been Marianina’s maternal great uncle. The young woman to whom the narrator was telling the story loses all romantic interest in the young storyteller just as Zambinella lost his zest for love and life. Balzac referred to Joseph Balsamo (alias Alessandro di Cagliostro) (1743-1795) in this novel Sarrassine. Balzac through his narrator described how a mesmerist at Madame d’Espard’s, claimed that the old Comte de Lanty was indeed Cagliostro who had escaped from St. Leo and “and amused himself making gold for his grandchildren.” Balzac described how the mysterious and wealthy Monsieur de Lanty had purchased the house of Marechal de Carigliano ten years prior. All the members of the family spoke Italian, French, Spanish, English and German. His sixteen-year-old daughter the Comtesse de Lanty, Marianina was described as an omnipotent siren. “The mysterious family had all the attractiveness of a poem by Lord Byron.” The narrator and a young woman he had met at a party at the Lanty home entered a boudoir where they saw a painting. “The picture represented Adonis stretched out on a lion’s skin. The lamp, in an alabaster vase, hanging in the centre of a boudoir, cast upon the canvas a soft light which enabled us to grasp all the beauties of the picture.” The narrator explained how the effeminate beauty of the male model in the painting, “It is a portrait […] a product of Vien’s genius. But that great painter never saw the original, and your admiration will be modified somewhat perhaps, when I tell you that this study was made from a statue of a woman (p.33).” “I believe this Adonis represents a relative of Madame de Lanty.” Camille Paglia called this the first postmodern novel. It inaugurated an era of decadence. Roland Barthe analysed Sarrassine in S/Z using an emerging science of narratology.”

1833a In “1833 Balzac conceived the idea of linking together his old novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in a series of books. This plan eventually led to 90 novels and novellas, which included more than 2,000 characters. Balzac’s huge and ambitious plan drew a picture of the customs, atmosphere, and habits of the bourgeois France. Balzac got down to the work with great energy, but also found time to pile up huge debts and fail in hopeless financial operations.”I am not deep,” the author once said, “but very wide.” Once he developed a plan to gain success in raising pineapples at his home at Ville d’Avray (Sevres). After two two years, he had to flee from his creditors and conceal his identity under the name of his housekeeper, Madamede Brugnolle. In the ‘Avant-propos’ to The Human Comedy from 1842 Balzac compares under the influence of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s theories of the animal kingdom and human society. “Does not Society make of man, according to the milieu in which his activity takes places, as many different men as there are varieties in zoology?” However, Balzac sees that human life and human customs are more multifarious and there are dramatic conflicts in love which seldom occur among animals.” Arnold Hauser (1962) credits Balzac with introducing the concept of man as an individual who exists only in relation to society. See Biography: Balzac. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/balzac.htm

1833b Leopold von Ranke wrote “The Great Powers” during the formative years in the German conception of history. The Prussian state was in ascendence and it had an expansionist agenda. German concepts of nationalism transformed as Prussia expanded its borders and its power increased. Romantic idealism of an inclusive nationalism were eventually replaced with the construction of a more exclusive Volksgeist. It is not surprising that in the expansionist mode of the nation state, that there was a great movement of reform and rejuvenation of the university in Germany, both as a teaching and a research structure. Lee (1996) described how the “German historical school developed the criteria of objectivity and critical use of archival documents into a “science of history”, Geschichtswissenschaft, the universality of Ranke’s vision grounded in the timeless “‘holy hieroglyphe’–God with his plan and his will” (Breisach 1983: 233), balanced the picture of uniqueness and ceaseless change historians painted. However, with the rise of the Prussian state and its expansionist agenda, idealism gave way to the construction of a Volksgeist as a foundation for an inclusive German nationalism underwriting unification. The decline of the transcendent element left historicism, as science, open to positivist challenge and charges of relativism. In the first instance, it could preserve its objectivity only at the loss of its ethical orientation; in the second, it would cease to qualify as a producer of systematic knowledge. Consequently, in an especially sustained way in Germany, but not only in Germany, efforts were made to rethink theory and method in social research.” (Lee 1996). Historians who rejected the universalizing vision of Ranke were accused by positivist sciences of slipping into relativism with its lack of objectivity and systemic knowledge production. The ethical dimension of memory work was undermined when there was an insistence on the objectivity of historical inquiries MFB.

1838 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 1838. Hermeneutics and criticism and other writings, A. Bowie (ed.), Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. In his article on the “Philosophy of History” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Daniel Little described the hermeneutic tradition of the human sciences, where “hermeneutic philosophers such as Schleiermacher (1838), Dilthey (1860–1903), and Ricoeur (2000) offer philosophical arguments for emphasizing the importance of narrative interpretation within our understanding of history. ” They emphasize “the “hermeneutic circle” through which humans undertake to understand the meanings created by other humans—in texts, symbols, and actions (Little 2007-2012).” [Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 1838. Hermeneutics and criticism and other writings, A. Bowie (ed.), Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.;

1840s The whole effort, even of those who, following Bossuet, Vico, Herder, Hegel (1840?), have applied themselves to the philosophy of history, has been hitherto to establish the presence of a providential destiny presiding over all the movements of man.

1850a marked a rupture with the literature of the past. Before 1850 the author was a witness to the universal. After 1850 the author had a choice. He could choose to remain in the past. Or he could choose to write in the present. The author became conscious and with his new awareness he became unhappy and dissatisfied. See (Barthes, Roland in Le Degré Zero de l’écriture, 1953).

1850b By the 19th century with Ranke and Droyson, interpretation was extended to include historical events. See Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research by Mats Alvesson and Kaj Sköldberg (2000:54). By c. 1850 Droysen stressed that knowledge gained by interpretation differed from knowledge gained from the scientific method.

1867 Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital, vol. 1.

1870s Herder argued that the authenticity of each human had his measure own measure. This concept of authenticity in which the difference between humans has a moral significance — entered deep into modern consciousness. See Taylor (1991).

1870sa The concept of experience ‘Erlebnis began to be used by continental philosophers. Experience is active, creating and provided with intention and meaning. Experience is organically connected to the whole life of the individual. Experience is not to be confused with the passive reception of British empiricism. See Gadamer (1989:60-70) and Alvesson and Skolberg (2000:55).

1870 Paris in 1870 was the capital of the 19th century, an allegory of power, agency and history (MFB). See Law and Heatherington (2003) argue that Benjamin’s claim that Paris, the Hausmannised city of straight lines, Euclidean geometry and glass-in arcades provides a way of spatializing time or folding time into space. They referred to Benjamin’s analysis of the angel of history. Walter Benjamin’s thoughts as laid out in the chapter entitled “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1988) in Illuminations.

1872 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, (1844 -1900), a German philosopher published The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche studied at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, University of Basel in Switzerland precursor of existentialism. He is considered to be a forerunner of `postmodern’ reactions against the spirit of modern culture. Foucault’s historical studies are based on philosophical assumptions based on Nietzsche. Rejected Hegelian view of history became increasingly deranged in his later years. In 1889 he suffered a severe breakdown Nietzsche further developed his ideas of the superman and the will to power, asserting that humans must learn to live without their gods or any other metaphysical consolations. Like Goethe’s Faust, humans must incorporate their devil and evolve “beyond good and evil” In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872; Eng. trans., 1968), Nietzsche presented a theory of Greek drama and of the foundations of art that has had profound effects on both literary theory and philosophy. In this book he introduced his famous distinction between the Apollonian, or rational, element in human nature and the Dionysian, or passionate, element, as exemplified in the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. When the two principles are blended, either in art or in life, humanity achieves a momentary harmony with the Primordial Mystery. This work, like his later ones, shows the strong influence of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as Nietzsche’s affinity for the music of his close friend Richard Wagner. What Nietzsche presented in this work was a pagan mythology for those who could accept neither the traditional values of Christianity nor those of Social Darwinism.

1883 Dilthey, Wilhelm. Introduction to the Human Sciences: In 1883, Wilhelm Dilthey began to make his case for an interpretative or hermeneutic approach to historically oriented human studies, the Geisteswissenschaften, roughly all of the humanities and the social sciences including history taken as a group, as distinguished from the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences. Dilthey considered it, “philosophy’s task to provide an epistemology that can show that the Geisteswissenschaften, although not as clearly definable in their first principles as the Naturwissenschaften, are no less fundamental, comprehensive, and objective in their results (Makkreel 1992: 38).” The original experiential foundation in descriptive psychology Dilthey proposed, denied “Ranke’s claim that to see history objectively one must ‘efface the self'” (Makkreel 1992: 54). He purposefully rejected the impersonal and abstract Kulturwissenschaften, with its occlusion of conflict and the unstated postulate of progress, in an on-going debate with the Baden neo-Kantians, Wilhelm Windelband and his student Heinrich Rickert” (Lee, Richard 1996).

1890s German non-idealists Dilthey, Windelbrand, Rickert, Simmel and Weber are often referred to as neo-Kantians. They rejected positivism beyond its application to the natural sciences. These authors put cultural science on an equal footing with natural science. Natural science could explain causes. Liberal arts and social sciences should explain meanings. These authors developed hermeneutics of interpretation through empathetic understanding of a past experience. See Alvesson and Sköldberg (2000:52).

1894 G. Frege argued that logic is not subjective but objective, its a matter of relations among propositions, predicates and terms.

1899? Dilthey explained knowledge gained from scientific method and that gained by interpretation as the difference between explanation (Erklaren) and understanding (Verstehen). Human sciences were acknowledged as distinct from natural sciences. Within the positivist paradigm, hermeneutics cannot produce factual knowledge although social scientists will argue that it produced knowledge claims (Alvesson and Sköldberg (2000:52).

1923 Georg Lukács (1885-1971) in his Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and class consciousness) contributed to the history of consciousness and hermeneutics by reinterpreting Marx through a Hegelian lens in which the key concepts of alienation and reification were developed. This shift in the interpretation of Marx’s writings towards a version of secular humanism was confirmed when Marx’s Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) were finally published in the 1930s. Georg Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist philosopher disavowed his own theories expounded in History and class consciousness when he encountered Stalinist criticism in the 1930s. Georg Lukács’ “formulation and defense of the doctrine of social realism in literature and the arts was widely influential in the cultural politics of the Soviet bloc.” See Mautner (1997:328-9).

1926 The Fall of the Roman Empire Revisited: Sidonius Apollinaris and His Crisis of Identity By Eric J. Goldberg: Scholars of Late Antiquity (the period roughly from A.D. 300-600) have long labored under the shadow of two monumental works: Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1787) and M. I. Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926). Though Gibbon, an intellectual of the Enlightenment, and Rostovtzeff, a Russian Marxist, approached their topic from very different viewpoints, they both agreed that the “transformation” of Western civilization from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages was a story of decline and decay. While Gibbon favored a moral and cultural explanation, Rostovtzeff not surprisingly emphasized economic and social factors. The last generation of scholars, however, has begun to revise this earlier scholarship. With the publication of A. H. M. Jones’s The Later Roman Empire, 284-602. A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (1964) and Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971), historians of Late Antiquity began to argue for continuity, transformation, and achievement where Gibbon and Rostovtzeff found only decline and decay. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH37/Goldberg.html

1927 Martin Heidegger published Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). According to Phillips (1996) Heidegger was influenced by his reading of Dilthey, but “moved beyond hermeneutics as the method of the human studies and in his Being and Time (1927/1962) gave it an ontological dimension by describing understanding and interpretation as essential features of man’s (Dasein’s) being. He could then say both that Dasein is hermeneutic in his very nature or being and that he, Heidegger, in his analysis was offering a “hermeneutic of Dasein.” In this way the ever-widening scope of hermeneutics was taken to a new level in the twentieth century by Heidegger and his pupil Hans-Georg Gadamer. They define two types of intuition, or inner ‘gazing': Verstehen as in objectivist hermeneutics which seeks out the underlying meaning not the explanation or cause. The second is Heidegger’s original unity in which the polarity between subject and object are dissolved. See Alvesson and Sköldberg (2000:52).

1930s Existential hermeneutics rejected the differentiation between subject and object. Proponents of existential hermeneutics examined Heidegger’s [1927/1962] Being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein inderweltsein) who in turn was influenced by Dilthey. See Alvesson and Sköldberg (2000:52). Keywords: interpretation and insight. Add to EndNote.

1933 Alexandre Kojève (1902-68), a brilliant Russian émigré began teaching a highly influential series of lectures on Hegelian concepts at the Parisian Ècole Practique des Hautes Ètudes on Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit. Kojève’s re-interpreted the Hegelian dialectic of ‘master-slave’. He used the master-slave metaphor in terms of social class relations essential to an understanding of historical process. Further he re-interpreted Hegel’s concept of the end of history since the 1800s mankind was gradually becoming organized as a universal state. His interpretations had a marked impact on post-WWII intellectuals such as Merleau-Ponty, Weil, Sartre, Aron, Bataille, Queneau, Lacan and postwar existentialism. Kojève, who was a member of the Russian aristocracy who fled Russia but remained sympathetic to communist ideals. Kojève developed the Hegelian concept of the end of history coinciding with the creation of a liberal democracy protecting man’s universal right to freedom which exists with the consent of the governed. Kojève believed that the heroic creation of the European Common Market was the embodiment of liberal democracy. See (Fukuyama 1989).

1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) French philosopher. In works such as La phenomenologie de la perception (1945) (Phenomenology of perception) and Le visible et ‘invisible (1964) (The visible and the invisible) he offered an analysis of perception, action, the self, and their interplay in human experience and reflection. The aim was to construct an anti-sceptical account of knowledge and reality that is neither monist nor dualist, and which has at its basis the world of perceptual experience. The originality of his description of this experienced world, called Lebenswelt (‘life-world’) by Husserl, is due to the attention given to the role of the body in the construction of a spatiotemporal world. In the early post-war years he was the driving force, together with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, behind the influential journal Les Temps Modernes, but in the early 1950S he fell out with them as his sympathy with the Soviet political system waned more rapidly than theirs (Mautner 1996:348).

1947 André Malraux introduced his notion of the musée imaginaire or Museum Without Walls. “In his well known Museum Without Walls of 1947, André Malraux commented on the “fictitious” aspect of art books and observed that reproductions not only change the scale of original works, they also make them lose any sense of relative proportion when gathered together in such a way. Enlarged details, lighting, angle of shots, colour, everything metamorphoses the works. Furthermore, reproduction can bring side by side works of art that could never be seen together simply because they are housed in various institutions or scattered in different locations, indoors and outdoors, all over the world. The end result for Malraux was nothing less than an “imaginary museum”, an ideal art museum, as opposed to a real one, one that transformed the way art was experienced, appreciated and understood” (Malraux, 1956).

1947-1967 Jean-Paul Sartre was influenced by Bergson, but more so by Husserl’s phénomenologie which influenced all philosophical thought from 1947 – 1967 in France. Sartre’s university education would not have included Hegel nor Kierkegaard. “Existence as pure movement.”

1950s Human consciousness evolved. In Britain Raymond Williams contributed to adult education producing relevant, respectful tools such as lists of key concepts to help share what had previously been elitist knowledge. Cultural studies opened up new ways of engaging with pluralism. As war veterans returned to their countries they took advantage of housing and education programs but they were not typical students. WWII vets were from First Nations and African Canadian backgrounds in Canada for example. The heightened pluralism of these learners impacted on the institutions they entered — not as one immediate reaction but in the long-term.

1957b Northrop Frye introduced a more systematic scientific form of critical study in his influential publication Anatomy of Criticism. Felperin (1985) cited in Honeycutt (2000) argued that Frye’s publication was the turning point causing the shift from the hermeneutic to semiotic method of critical inquiry. By 1960 theory ruled in large part by structuralism during the 1960s had established itself as the guiding light of literary-critical activity replacing the New Criticism prevalent since the 1940s. See Honeycutt (2000).

1960s Bernard Dauenhauer 2005 [2002] in his entry updated in 2011, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, explained that one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century, Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), shifted in the 1960s from a methodology in the tradition of existential phenomenology to one which combined “phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation [to study human reality]. For hermeneutics, whatever is intelligible is accessible to us in and through language and all deployments of language call for interpretation. Accordingly, “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.”[1 Ricoeur, Paul. 1960s [1995]. “Intellectual Autobiography” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis E. Hahn. Chicago: Open Court, 1995:16]. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic or linguistic turn did not require him to disavow the basic results of his earlier investigations. It did, however, lead him not only to revisit them but also to see more clearly their implications (Dauenhauer 2005 [2002]).”

1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer published his magnum opus Truth and Method (1960 [1975]). In this seminal publication Gadamer refuted the truth-claim of ‘natural’ science claiming science was dependent on language. In Truth and Method Gadamer developed the full implications of Heidegger’s ontological reformulation of hermeneutics. For Gadamer the emphasis in hermeneutics falls on historicity. Gadamer rejected Dilthey’s modern systematic approach to hermeneutics arguing that it focused too much attention on authorial intent and context. This positivism in hermeneutics was flawed and hegemonic. The interpreter does not interpret and understand from an Archimedean point but is always immersed in his or her own historicity. Hermeneutics is an encounter between the researcher of the present, aware of his or her historically conditioned categories of understanding, and a past that presents itself for interpretation. From this perspective the very notion of an “historical object,” separate from myself as the interpreter, does not make sense. In Gadamer’s words, “a text is understood only if it is understood in a different way every time” (1975: 275-6). In Truth and Method this process of hermeneutic understanding is described as a “fusion of horizons.” A horizon is “the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point” (1975: 269). Abstractly, there is a horizon of the present, the categories of understanding which we cannot see beyond, and (1975:62) a horizon of the historical epoch that is being studied, the standpoint of the historical figure. But this is an abstraction. We do not disconnect ourselves from the past. The horizons of present and past overlap and fuse into one great horizon. Finally, the fusion of horizons is framed in terms of what Gadamer calls the logic of question and answer. The text engages us in a dialogue about its subject matter. The text, as a response to an implicit question, challenges us to address the same implicit question that it has confronted. Hermeneutic understanding of the past is then not a simple reconstruction of the context in which the historical text emerged; it is rather a conversation with the tradition in which the issues that exercised the particular epoch continue to exercise us. Taken from Phillips, J. 1996. “Key Concepts: Hermeneutics.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3:1:61-69.”

1960s The philosopher John Lucas . . .

1960 In Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press) renowned philosopher W. V. O. Quine denied there were any mental experiences or events at all (Barr 2003:17). There are no conscious processes. Such materialistic philosophy like Quine’s denied subjective experience. Free will is an illusion. According to Quine, there is no purpose or teleological explanation for phenomena, only mechanistic laws.

1962 Arnold Hauser wrote about Balzac in Volume 4 of Hauser’s Social History of Art. “Balzac himself always speaks of his characters as of natural phenomena, and when he wants to describe his artistic intentions, he never speaks of his psychology, but always of his sociology, of his natural history of society and of the function of the individual in the life of the social body. He became, anyhow, the master of the social novel, if not as the ‘doctor of the social sciences’, as he described himself, yet as the founder of the new conception of man, according to which ‘the individual exists only in relation to society’.”

1976 Gadamer, Hans Georg (1976). Philosophical hermeneutics (David E. Linge, Ed. & Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Many of Gadamer’s essays that were translated by Frederick G. Lawrence and published in English in Reason in the Age of Science were written in 1976.

1980 Nicholas Abercrombie published Class, Structure, and Knowledge: Problems in the Sociology of Knowledge.

1980s”Beginning around 1980, scholars began to speak of a “crisis” in the discipline. No longer secure with the idea of empirical research, an insecurity sparked in large part by poststructuralist critiques in literary criticism, historians of art began to speak of “theory” as that something which was ideologically opposed to “history.” At stake seemed to be the conception of Art as such. The crisis mentality eventuated in a hardening of positions: those scholars who long had an investment in positivistic pursuits proudly reasserted their role as “historians” and became outspoken in their dismissal of extra-artistic analyses, particularly those that paraded their origins in psychoanalysis, feminism, Semiotics, and Marxism. On the other side, the self-proclaimed “new” art historians (read “theoreticians”) descried the politically invested, what they called the conservatively capitalist, motives of academically entrenched art historians, particularly in England and the United States. Two book titles from the middle of the 1980s, The End of the History of Art? (Hans Belting, 1983, trans., 1987) and The End of Art Theory (Victor Burgin, 1986) suggest that the result of the controversy raging in a discipline long unaccustomed to attack was that feelings of crisis had turned into self-aggrandizing visions of the apocalypse. Matters became a little less strident as the 1980s ended, and it seems possible to map the historical evolution of the disciplinary changes and attempt a brief overview of the variety of theoretical positions that have come to animate the field (Holly 1997).”

early 1980’s Greater disenchantment with the limits of logical-empirical research methodologies began

1980s Paul Ricoeur developed Heidegger’s concept of poetic hermeneutics formulated on Heidegger’s later works, a form of aleithic hermeneutics. Poetic hermeneutics transcends the subject-object problematic and is preoccupied with uncovering the hidden underlying pattern of metaphor or narrative. See Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000:58)

1981c Paul Ricoeur introduced the idea of an arc of spectrum within hermeneutics to encompass both understanding and explanation. (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000:53) He distinguished between a ‘hermeneutics of tradition’ where the inquirer listens intently to a text in order to access the hidden message and to gain insight ex. Gadamer; and a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in which interpretation becomes demystification. They refuse naive readings and reject the concept of an innocuous text; they suspects hidden agendas and seek out the larger circumscribing powerful rules and systems of discourse within which the text was produced ex. Marx, Foucault, Freud, Nietzsche, Habermas, Apel., Foucault’s The Hermeneutics of the Subject 1981–1982,

1984bGiddens published The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration, in which he examined the social theory by reworking “conceptions of human being and human doing, social reproduction and social transformation. Of prime importance in this respect is a dualism that is deeply entrenched in social theory, a division between objectivism and subjectivism. Objectivism was a third -ism characterizing the orthodox consensus, together with naturalism and functionalism. In spite of Parsons’ terminology of ‘the action frame of reference’, there is no doubt that in his theoretical scheme the object (society) predominates over the subject (the knowledgeable human agent). Others whose views could be associated with that consensus were very much less sophisticated in this respect than was Parsons. By attacking objectivism — and structural sociology — those influenced by hermeneutics or by phenomenology were able to lay bare major shortcomings of those views. But they in turn veered sharply towards subjectivism. The conceptual divide between subject and social object yawned as widely as ever.[3] (Giddens 1984),

1984cH. Dreyfus wrote the chapter Beyond hermeneutics: Interpretation in late Heidegger and recent Foucault. In G. Shapiro & A. Sica (Eds.), Hermeneutics: Question and prospects in which he discussed a Theory of Interpretation. http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/IR/IRphil.html

1985eHull, C. (1985). Between the lines: The analysis of interview data as an exact art. British Educational Research Journal, 11, 27-32. Heading: Logic of Inquiry: Interpretive Research in Education. http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/IR/IRphil.html

1985g “Latour uses the cases of Boyle and Hobbes, borrowed from a critical reading of Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985), to illustrate the seventeenth century struggle to construct the modern constitution of truth and its great divide. On the one hand, Hobbes “political science” sought to construct a political culture beyond nature. Here, nature and nonhuman activity can never have a bearing on what people do in the pure realm of political culture. Culture was seen as a purely human realm influenceable only by the creative practical and political activities of human actors. On the other hand, Boyle’s “scientific politics” endeavored to construct the rules and rituals for the discovery of nature through scientific experiments. Nature and nonhumans and their rules were beyond the reaches of political culture and human cognitive and practical alteration. Nature was a purely nonhuman realm influenceable only by an absolute nature of things. Boyle’s experimental science also introduced the intervention of inert bodies or nonhuman actors into knowledge building. These bodies become active components of knowledge making: They are capable of showing, signing, writing, and scribbling on laboratory instruments before trustworthy witnesses” (Latour 1993:23) (quoted in Ward 1996)”,

1985d. Hull, C. 1985.. Between the lines: The analysis of interview data as an exact art. British Educational Research Journal, 11, 27-32. Heading: Logic of Inquiry: Interpretive Research in Education. http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/IR/IRphil.html

1986b. Angus, L. B. 1986.. Developments in ethnographic research in education: From interpretive to critical ethnography. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 20, 59-67. Heading: Logic of Inquiry: Interpretive Research in Education.http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/IR/IRphil.html

1986j. Maxcy, S. J. & Stanley, W. B. 1986.. Reflective inquiry, reconstructionism, and positivism: A reexamination of the process of social education. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 19, 62-71. Heading: Logic of Inquiry: Interpretive Research in Education. http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/IR/IRphil.html

1988a. Charles Taylor published a chapter entitled The Moral Topography of Self in a book entitled Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory: Interpretive Perspectives on Personality, Psychotherapy and Psychopathology. ” Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor employed the term `moral topography’ to explore the thesis that `the self exists essentially in moral space by means of a master image, a spatial one’. According to Taylor, a point of origin for the Western sense of self is autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, which construct an `inward’ journey towards a soul which is sedimented in religious tradition and personal memory. In the modern era, this same journey is revisited in therapeutic techniques which aim at a discovery of some core inner self on which personality might be reconstructed. See “Compass” Kevin Murray,

1988c. Michel de Certeau wrote his influential book entitled The Practice of Everyday Life. “Writing in the tradition of Lefevbre (more so than anyone else who comes to mind at the moment., his work touches upon contemporary Foucault and Bourdieu only briefly and then moves on to do much more. For example, in the way of analyses of strategic and tactical behavior, resistances, spatial practices, sublatern hermeneutics, and state/scientific ideologies of secrecy and knowledge. In de Certeau, we see not just a clearing of the intellectual path for towering figures such as Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Giddens, Lash, Appadurai, and Taussig (to name only a handful. – enabling them to come whistling along with their variously insightful ideas from A to Z – but we see it done with a panache and “Ich weiss es nicht” that is memorable in the persona it invokes.” From a review by Dongieux.,

1989. Charles Taylor wrote Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity in which he argued that the modern concepts of self which rejected a moral code based on the existence of a transcendent God and His Creation in the form of Nature, give pride of place to the inner powers of the self to construct, transfigure or interpret the world. The artist’s inner hermeneutics is not conveniently encoded in a medeival iconography. The artist’s highly subjective invented language can only be understood by learning the artist’s language. There are no convenient familiar symbols that automatically convey meanings. (See also Thomson 1999 discussing Barnett Newman’s The Voice of Fire. “The public’s main objection to the purchase of Voice of Fire was rooted, I think, in its conception or notion of abstract expressionism. Abstract expressionism is a “less-is-more” kind of art, and we live in a “more-is-better” kind of society. We live in a popular democracy, but abstract expressionism makes no concessions to popular taste. Abstract expressionism rejects the romantic concepts and figurative forms (portrait, landscape, still life. that make up many people’s idea of art. It is assertive and uncompromising, and demands an effort of understanding. It is, as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor points out, “transcendent”: it shares with mediaeval art the assumption that meaning may lie beyond, rather than in, appearances. Unlike mediaeval art, however, modern art does not have recourse to familiar symbols to convey its meanings. Instead, it is highly subjective. As Charles Taylor said in Sources of the Self, “unlike previous conceptions of moral sources in nature and God, these modern views give a crucial place to our own inner powers of constructing or transfiguring or interpreting the world. “This means that a painter invents his own language of form and colour, and in order to understand the work, the viewer, like Serge, must learn the artist’s language. The French painter and theorist, Maurice Denis said at the turn of this century (as we look to the millennium.: “It is well to remember that a picture — before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote — is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.” In other words, the ostensible subject of a painting, its “story,” is less important than its formal organization. When we get down to basics, and think of the two-dimensional surface of a painting, we become more aware of the formal qualities inherent in all paintings (Thomson 1999..” “Charles Taylor, discussing the epiphanic nature of modern art and its interweaving of the subjective and the transcendent, fell back on these lines of the American poet, Wallace Stevens: “The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God. After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” If poetry — or art — is “life’s redemption,” if the artist can “wrest truth from the void,” then the responsibility of a public gallery is to march steadfastly through the fire of controversy in the interest of ensuring that the artist can communicate this redemptive truth to the largest possible public (Thomson 1999..”

1989 Gadamer published his influential work in which he traced the roots of development of hermeneutics. See Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000:52.

1990a. Loewenstein, David and James Grantham Turner, eds., Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. “At the centre of this unit is the study of two biblical epics: the first, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, probably the first canonical work of English literature; the second, Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, the first epic poem by an English woman, long mis-attributed and neglected. We will read both works as responses to defeated political aspirations, and attempts to create republican poetics. We will also consider other writing by the same authors, including Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, her fragmentary translation of Lucretius, and some of Milton’s prose. From these will arise many questions: was there a republican aesthetic? How did writers respond to the collapse of radical political ideals and (comparative. religious toleration when 1660 brought the restoration of Charles II? How have literary historians participated in the occlusion of Britain’s republican traditions? While there are no pre- or co-requisites, some knowledge of seventeenth-century literature or history would be an advantage.”

1990c. Pierre Bourdieu “The Intellectual Field: a world apart” in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Polity Press, 1990. From the “Frankfurt School critique of Karl Manheim to the work of Michel Foucault this course examines the play between interpretation and explication. By delving into these debates on our locatedness in history and language, we will explore how the place of the rational is negotiated by various models of the thinking body. We will focus on the problematic of transcoding (reporting in one context material gathered in an other. and map out the ideological stakes in theorizing the structure of experience.”

1991a. Coombe 1991. argued that cultural anthropologists ensconced in modernity defined their fields of study within a narrow framework. “Hermeneutics and cultural interpretation can maintain. splendid isolation only insofar as they separate the symbolic from the political and construct cultural tradition as a monological realm of unified meanings and values. To do so is to evade the historically specific processes by which certain meanings become privileged, while others are delegitimated — the practices through which unity is forged from difference by the marginalization and silencing of oppositional voices and alternative understandings” (Coombe 1001:191 cited in M’Closkey 2002:247.. Cited in M’Closkey, Kathy. 2002. Swept under the Rug: a Hidden History of Navajo Weaving. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.,

1992a. Carol Gilligan and Brown 1992 moved towards a qualitative interpretive methodology with roots in European philosophy (Dilthey, Husserl, Heidigger. for both data-gathering and analytic purposes. In “The Harmonics of Relationship” 1992. Brown and Gilligan presented what was then considered to be innovated methodology in North American academic psychology. See Simpson. They had become dissatisfied with the strict empirical tradition to which feminists formerly adhered in North America (Kimball, 1991.. Brown and Gilligan used hermeneutics for both data-gathering and analytic purposes. Hermeneutics was already familiar in North America in the fields of “philosophy of language, phenomenology, semi-structured interview work, and psychotherapy process research (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Shapiro, 1987; Gendlin, 1972; Marcia et al, 1993.. Even in mainstream psychiatric research (Gunderson, 1993., it is now being spoken of. It is commonly used for initial information gathering prior to the development of measurement instruments. It is also employed in parallel with standard measures, to ensure that the human richness is not lost when statistical techniques are required. Qualitative analysis is more familiar in sociological and anthropological research.” http://www.sfu.ca/~psimpson/crossroads2.htm

1996a. Alan Sokal 1996. published this short article entitled “A physicist’s experiment with cultural studies” revealed that his previous submission to Social Text a prestigious cultural studies journal edited by New York professor Andrew Ross, entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was a satirical piece intended to reveal the extent to which cultural studies had become rhetoric-driven, impotent, shallow and meaningless. Sokol’s article passed peer review and was published as a serious contribution to postmodern critique of objective science in a issue of Social Text that was devoted to the “Science Wars.” The articles inflammed debates on university campuses. Bruno Latour 1999. in his book entitled Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies called for a realistic realism adopting a more balanced constuctivist approache. Scientists who adhered to realism asked the epinous question “Do you believe in reality?” in a voice that resembled “Do you believe in communism?” or “Do you believe in the one True God, Catholic and Universal? Bell noted the controversy generated by these articles(Bell 1998:62).

1996b. Much of the debate has since centred around rescuing the sociological Verstehen of Weber from its empathetic roots by showing the importance of verstehen’s “historical aspect” both for Weber and even for his theoretical forebears, Rickert and Dilthey (Oakes; eg. Bryant 1985.. This involves critiquing Abel’s caricature of verstehen which focusses on the empathetic as well as Gadamer’s portrait in which he argues that the empathetic aspect of Verstehen was uppermost in 19th century Geistwissenschaften which featured a hermeneutic oriented to method, in contrast to a 20th century orientation to a hermeneutics of truth. Thus Oliver comments of the main nineteenth century proponents of Verstehen, Dilthey, Rickert, and Schliermacher that, ‘none of the writers examined rely exclusively on empathy. Understanding in a historical and social context is characteristic of historicism and dominates Weber’s view of verstehen, even allowing for comments he makes on the value of empathy’ (Oliver 1983:543). Thus Weber rejects both the positivist project of reconstructing the past as it was and the idealist hermeneutic of rethinking the Other’s thoughts (see Weber 1975:163-180). 110. See Shields 1996.

1996. Stephen Jay Gould wrote Full House: the Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin.

1998a. Denzin and Lincoln described hermeneutics as one of the qualitative methodologies used by social sciences. They described hermeneutics as an approach to the analysis of texts that stresses how prior understandings and prejudices shape the interpretive process. See Denzin and Lincoln 1998:30..

1998b. Joseph Margolis 1998. published Radical Changes in Aesthetics in which he acknowledged that “pretensions of neutrality, resistance to historicity, apodictic certainties, the reliability of modal invariences, confidence in a legible and independent world are now no longer unquestionably dominant–and can no longer expect to recover the sense of unchallenged fixity that prevailed through a good part of the first half of the twentieth century.” Strong practices of the past–along the lines of empiricism and the unity of science, Francophone structuralism, Husserlian phenomenology, romantic hermeneutics, in particular: in effect, strong forms of objectivism, have yielded ground to the upstart concessions. Small wonder, therefore, that theories of art, critical interpretation, and cultural history should, within the usual span of philosophical aesthetics, accord more and more compliantly with conceptual changes that are now fairly strongly entrenched in the most admired sciences.”

2000a. Dominick LaCapra (2000) published History and Reading in which he proposed “to address the problem of oversimplification by reading the text in relation to multiple interacting contexts, rather than assuming that it reflects just one context. He suggests six possible contexts for interpreting complex texts: the author’s intentions, his motivations, society, culture (elite culture., corpus (of the author’s works., and structure (genre..)” The Vermeer painting chosen as bookcover portrays a young woman lost in the letter she is reading by the daylight coming through the open window. She is reading the text/letter so deeply, she is not reading her context. LaCapra compared and contrasted the narrative strategies and modes of analysis of Tocqueville and Foucault. LaCapra (2000) discussed deconstruction. “The cure is in the malaise; the dosage counts; deconstruction is the discursive cure. Derrida describes this in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Dissemination 1981. Chicago. Deconstruction can lead to a ‘mise-en-abime’ or to a redemptive reading.” Experience combined with dialectical transcendence is the foundation of meaning. ‘Mise en abime’ is when all meaning is deferred or lost when the possibilities of meaning are expanded infinitely. De Man’s deconstruction, the reader seeks out the hybridized in-between elements. The text over deconstructed no longer says what the author intended. Deconstruction, as an analysis of text in which the author’s intentions are questioned and refuted by examining the ‘dialogical forces’ particularly where the author relied on binary opposites (inside/outside, identity/difference, male/female. De Man’s ideal reading is a practice of criticism where meaning is revisited in order to avoid ideological myths. Hermeneutics is interpretation that seeks the meaning of texts. (Lecapra 2000:52.”,

2001. Zygmunt Bauman published The Individualized Society in 2001. In a discussion on Bauman’s social theory Tony Fitzgerald described how Bauman presented a concept of intellectuals as translators between the various traditions, cultures and philosophies which constitute the plural world we live in. These intellectuals must develop a specialism of affecting positive communication between different cultures and traditions which includes 1. Adopting a positive notion of ideology which accepts that all knowledge is grounded in the irrational and thus that all knowledge is arbitrary; 2. A rediscovery of hermeneutics (preferably after Gadamer.; a sophisticated manifesto against truth and true method which seeks to redefine the goals of social theory as interpretation; 3. An adoption of the neo-pragmatism of the North American philosopher, Richard Rorty and a consequent rejection of the Lockean-Kantian tradition.” Fitzgerald, Tony http://www.sociologyonline.co.uk/post_essays/PopBauman.htm,

2004. Major debates: the use of Foucault by Rorty, Taylor and Hacking in Philosophy. From a course outline by James Tully (2004.. “The rationale for the seminar is the following. Although Michel Foucault 1926-1984. is one of the three or four most original, influential and cited scholars in the humanities and social sciences today, his work is often poorly understood and caricatured by many of his critics and followers. This problem is unsurprising as his works are demanding and his subject matter, approach and objectives changed through the course of his career. The seminar aims to address this problem by a careful reading of his most important works. Moreover, his works and methods are now at the center of the major debates in the humanities and social sciences – for example, the Foucault-Habermas debate, Foucault and Enlightenment, the use of Foucault by Rorty, Taylor and Hacking in Philosophy, Foucault and critical legal studies, the Foucault and feminism debate, the techniques of internal colonization and the possibilities of resistance in Indigenous studies, the use of Foucault by Edward Said and others in post-colonial and subaltern studies, Foucault and post-modernism, Foucault and the ‘history of the present’, the Foucault-inspired Governmentality school of advanced liberal societies, globalization and imperialism, Foucault and ethics, Foucault on freedom and truth-telling (parrhesia., the relationship of Foucault to Nietzsche and Kant, to name a few. These debates are redefining the humanities and social sciences for the 21st century. By approaching a select number of these current debates and corresponding case studies after reading the primary texts, we will be in a better position to understand what is at stake in these important debates and to learn from the criticisms and defences of Foucault’s work what is valuable and what is worth going beyond. It is hoped that this will give us a better appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of his works and methods, and how they may be useful in our own work.”

Thank you for taking the time to comment. I am grateful to Web 2.0 for providing a virtual space where I can share years of notes from academic readings. I took notes from this book on April 6, 2002 and entered them into EndNote bibliographic database. (I have since tried to replace EndNote with open source bibliographic databases including CiteULike and deli.cio.us, but neither have the powerful capacity of compatibility with word processors, flexibility and findability.)

I believe the citation was,

LaCapra, Dominick. 2000. History and Reading. Toronto. University of Toronto Press.

Other notes I took on the same publication are,

“LaCapra proposes to address the problem of oversimplification by reading the text in relation to multiple interacting contexts, rather than assuming that it reflects just one context. He suggests six possible contexts for interpreting complex texts: the author’s intentions, his motivations, society, culture (elite culture), corpus (of the author’s works), and structure (genre).”

From History and Reading
“Deconstruction, the cure is in the malaise; the dosage counts; deconstruction is the discursive cure. Derrida describes this in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Dissemination (1981) Chicago. Deconstruction can lead to a ‘mise-en-abime’ or to a redemptive reading.” Experience combined with dialectical transcendence is the foundation of meaning. ‘Mise en abime’ is when all meaning is deferred or lost when the possibilities of meaning are expanded infinitely. (Lecapra 2000:52)”

“De Man’s deconstruction, the reader seeks out the hybridized in-between elements. The text over deconstructed no longer says what the author intended. Deconstruction, as an analysis of text in which the author’s intentions are questioned and refuted by examining the ‘dialogical forces’ particularly where the author relied on binary opposites (inside/outside, identity/difference, male/female) De Man’s ideal reading is a practice of criticism where meaning is revisited in order to avoid ideological myths. Hermeneutics is interpretation that seeks the meaning of texts. (Lecapra 2000:52)”

“1940s, late 1950s Ecole Normale Superieure was highly politicized, like France. Post WWII; ENS provided philosophical training for academically gifted students (to become teachers). ENS alumni were prestigious. They were academically powerful. They influenced curriculum and teaching appointments. In the 1950s alienation was a key subject in philosophical debates.”